heads up horror devs, i bothered to look up the eternal darkness sanity system patent and apparently it expired in 2021 go wild patents.google.com/patent/US693... - ThreadSky

amithero.bot • 4 days ago

heads up horror devs, i bothered to look up the eternal darkness sanity system patent and apparently it expired in 2021

go wild

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6935954B2/en

Comments

virusdave.bsky.social•4 days ago

HELL YEAH!!! That game rocked for that one mechanic, if nothing else (although I truly liked the whole game)

timcfield.bsky.social•7 hours ago

It was a good game, but it was pretty crappy how you had to play it 4 times to get the good ending

amithero.bot•4 days ago

if you don't know, basically the game had a "sanity meter" that tracks the player throughout the game. the more fucked up shit you saw, the lower it went. your character will start hallucinating sounds, enemies, etc.

but also the game's UI would start to fuck with you too.

amithero.bot•4 days ago

If it went too low, the game would fully smack the fourth wall. It would pretend to delete your save files in front of you. It would pretend to shut off the tv. It would pretend to crash.

It deliberately make you not trust a single thing going on.

amithero.bot•4 days ago

that's real game horror babyyyyyyy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXcajQnasc

kosmologyb.bsky.social•3 hours ago

is it 3:33 already?

rickyah.bsky.social•4 days ago

WTF, I ve created more complex flow diagrams when I was 10, usin a Commodore in my school creating a text based dungeon crawler, ffs.
How could this can got patented?

daniople.com•4 days ago

📌

bmbrice.bsky.social•4 days ago

Ooooooooooh I need people to start incorporating that asap

maestrafenix.bsky.social•4 days ago

Excellent excellent! Always loved what Eternal Darkness did

Really hope indies picks this up. It is really a great way to mess with the players

moah3.bsky.social•4 hours ago

Wait, that was patented?

inaries.bsky.social•4 days ago

Perfect my operation can go forward. Now to learn how to gamedev.

jawabreaker.bsky.social•6 hours ago

👀👀

cyesterling.bsky.social•3 days ago

It's don't starve

lionofperth.bsky.social•2 hours ago

Commented to find later.

I’m verifying this.

That game? The bath tub scene always got me.

thealeks.bsky.social•4 days ago

I'd rather avoid sanity mechanics altogether. I understand keeping them for legacy systems, like Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu ttrpg ... if you've already got, like, a ten year campaign going and you don't want to switch horses ... but we really can do better going forward, I think.

thealeks.bsky.social•4 days ago

I am not gonna lie, some of the goofs Eternal Darkness pulled with its particular take on it were very clever, but even if one were to take a page out of that particular book, I think we can probably frame it in ways other than "your character is (temporarily) mentally ill now, ain't that freaky?"

thealeks.bsky.social•4 days ago

Frame it as reality itself warping under the influence of unknowable forces, a Field of Quantum Improbability, the interplay of standard fear and confusion being preyed on by ancient unknowable psionic emanations, resulting in distractions and illusions. I think there are a lot of possible options.

thealeks.bsky.social•4 days ago

With a fairly simple refactor of the underlying causes, I think we can have most of, if not all of, the fun bits without trivializing trauma, which is, like, really, really, really not fun, any more than it's already been trivialized (into the ground) by most media.

summerlaverdure.bsky.social•4 days ago

we're probably going to be in the minority but i agree with you
eternal darkness did this, it did it well and i got all i needed from there
why do we need it in more games lol

thealeks.bsky.social•4 days ago

That's a concern too, but it's not so much a matter of novelty or originality for me. Multiple games can reuse the same mechanics and ideas and do their own thing with them well enough.

I just find the whole CoC derived "sanity mechanics" thing to be harmful and alienating as a conceptual frame.

thealeks.bsky.social•4 days ago

Ironically, I tend to actually LIKE, sometimes love, most of the games that lean on it ... because I do actually like many of the other aspects of weird fiction and cosmic horror (aside from the "ew, foreigners" bit that Lovecraft was fixated on), and it's like a piece of mold on a delicious cake..

thealeks.bsky.social•4 days ago

I'm an adult (well ... technically speaking), and I can pick off the piece of mold and eat the otherwise perfectly good cake. Waste not, want not and so on. But, like, we can also just try to make sure there's no mold on our cake, and not have to worry about it in the first place.